We Americans are so successful and complacent that we don't even think we need to know our enemies.

As for understanding them, all we think we have to understand is that they are wrong.

Those of us with more intellectual leanings may think that those other places we hear rumors of, and sometimes visit on holidays, are vestiges of a forgotten history, a lost world without relevance to ours. This, after all, is the American century. History by definition is American history. All else is a footnote.

Where do Muslims belong in this? We don't know and we don't much care. We are the strongest and the best equipped. If they don't like how we do things, let them try to beat us. We'll sweep them away with our superior technology operated by our superior technologists.

But sometimes enough information comes through from that Muslim world to make us wonder for a moment. There are over a billion of them. Four times as many as us. They occupy a lot more territory than we do. They own that godamned oil that we need so badly for our way of life--for make no mistake, our national dream is based on relatively inexpensive oil. To no longer be able to use a car as we do today is to put an obscure but serious psychic wound on the American dream. If the wound is bad enough we find ourselves in something not dreamed of in the American dream.

A lot of big dreams are in cutthroat competition with each other. Is Islam to be successful at the expense of Americanism? Is Americanism to come out on top, to the perhaps fatal wounding of Islam?

What is it like to be a Muslim?

That is the question we don't ask ourselves. We don't ask ourselves to do the imaginative exercise, or the "thought-experiment" as Einstein called it, of looking at ourselves through Muslim eyes.

 

Trouble is, in part, we (or at least I) have no idea what Muslim eyes, a Muslim head is like. But the experiment is necessary. So, with all due respect--

I am, for this purposes of this experiment, a Muslim. After it is over, I'll return to my usual godless state. But for now, I have a lot of religious conviction. I live in the Middle East.

As I look at myself, I see that I am brown-skinned, maybe even black or yellow skinned. Any color skin can be a Muslim's, but not, usually, white. How much this matters, I, as a white man trying to imagine myself brown or black, cannot tell. I've heard that the black and brown races take color very seriously, so for the purposes of the thought experiment, I will try to, too.

 

The next thing I notice (being me) is that I have a lot of wives. I doubt I can afford all these wives. But I've got them anyhow. I have a really big extended family of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins and nephews. I do them favors. They do me favors. Doing stuff for your family is a major good in the society I live in.

I'm also pretty darned religious. Some of me is this way by conviction. Others of me are this way to stay in good standing with the neighors, all of whom either are or proclaim religious conviction.

In one way or another, I take the letter of the religious law seriously. I make a good attempt to pray five times a day. I keep Ramadan for a month every year. There's a lot of work to being a Muslim. The stuff you have to do gets more religious conviction into your head than you might imagine.

I go to a religious discussion group, too. They are all friends of mine, except for a few I hate, but have gotten used to over the years. We meet and talk about religion and related matters--everything relates to religion--and sometimes one of our priests, an Imam, attends and gives us his slant, which he puts out as the only slant. We buy this slant, more or less, but we know there are a lot of ways of believing in the Muslim world.

 

Our talks always get around to economics. Money is life itself. Especially when you don't have a camel to your name, and wouldn't know what to do with one if you had one. As a matter of fact, I sell soft drinks in the bazaar. It's a job my brother-in-law gave me. The pay is shit, but it keeps me and my wives eating. And I get to go to all the family feasts, which comes to a lot of food over a month.

I have read somewhere that Americans have this odd cult of the Job, in which they literally worship the Job they do, and assign to it all their spirituality. Sounds weird to me.

I have seen Americans. I have seen a lot of fat, loudly dressed, vulgar people who expected me to understand their language, and never learned mine. These Americans have somehow captured the wealth of the world. How? The discussion group says they did it by ignoring religion and turning to the false god Technology.

There might be something in that. For a long time, technology appeared to be invincible, a force stronger than God. And Tech­nogy meant worship of the Job.

But I, a Muslim in my Muslim world, don't believe jobs should be all that important. What's important is that race should struggle against race, tribe against tribe, religion against religion. Life is best spent excitedly, out in the streets, with a lot of shouting, but relatively little bloodshed. Though I don't object to the idea of spilling blood in a good cause, God's cause.

 

The West, the non-Islamites, produce a lot of terrible stuff, not the least bad of which is rock and roll music. I have read newspaper accounts of scientists who prove that rock and roll excites young people, that when young people get excited, they experiment more than they should. They experiment with sex! Not just safe sex, which is sex with your wife, or with a partner who makes no difference to your marriage contract. Unsafe sex in the Muslim world is sex with a partner of the opposite sex without a marriage conract.

My real job, as I know damned well, is to help get my sister married to a strict, old-fashioned man who will keep her safely indoors where neither I nor anyone else needs to see her except at family get-togethers.

Marriage contracts, legal contracts binding person to person, provide an infrastructure in which a civilization can flourish. This is what we Muslims stand for. Not for rock and roll and the freedom that means godlessness, shameful behavior, and exposes one to ridicule.

I do not weep for your American dead. Does that make me cruel? The more than 5000 who died at your World Trade Center towers didn't move me like as they moved you. Like you, I wished it had not happened. But unlike you, I wished you had not created the conditions that made it happen.

But as for the number, we Muslims are used to dealing in big numbers. We lose more than 5000 a year in plagues you never hear of, or floods whose stories appear in the backpages of your newspapers, well after the important news of what company is buying what other company. How much did you mourn for the dead in the floods of Bangladesh a few years ago?

It's our civilization against yours, we Muslims think. Ours is far from perfect, but we'll solve all the problems outselves in a way, not a Yankee Doodle Rock and Roll white-skinned fat gutted way.

And that's what it feels like to me to be a Muslim.